The mailserver that we use here is Kopano Core Community Edition, it has alot of features and works very well with the setup we got.

One ”problem” with CE is upgradeing, some packages sometimes get obsoloteted but still has dependecies that brakes yum yum to upgrade. From 8.4.90 to 8.5.80 we had some problems with libkcl0 that wasnt aviable in the new 8.5 but many dependencies in the old. A rpm -Uvh –nodeps was necessary to resolve issues and then remove libkcl0 because it wasnt needed any more.

In all this I set up a Kopano Core CE yum repo for RHEL7 on my webserver, updates becomes easier for me and if someone wants to use it feel free to add this to your repolist.

Updates to this repo will be once every two weeks or so, drop me a line if I have missed out something. (When writing this there is no easy way of scripting around getting the correct urls from download.kopano.io automatically.)

In the process of moving from an old vCenter to a new vCenter (same storage) you might need consider some things

What do you want to do and when?

Commit snapshots? (consolidate disks)

Remove floppys?

Remove from old vCenter

Add to new vCenter

Add hardware?

Add hotplug cpu/mem?

Snapshot before upgrade virtual hardware?

Hardware upgrade?

New network name?

Upgrade vmware tools (reboot?) ?

Scripts to help with this, both on the way down and up so it will be made exactly the same every time and dont do anything else than what is set out to do. Im not used to powershell so bare with me.

What if we have vm appliances with very old hardware versions? should those get upgraded directly or does it need more digging to see if its supported? In this version its not yet considered and if we have a CSV file with alot of vm’s we can migrate/move all these vms at once but in doing so you have little control over whats happening in your vCenter environment, letting this beast loose on 100+ vms might be bad for you hart.

This is a short notice on how I did the BIOS upgrade on HP Elitebook 2530p (tested on 2530,2540,2570,Probook, 6s60 and 6570)

First of all, this got very important after little over a year of running Windows7, Bitlocker and HP Elitebook, some computers reencrypted their disks (SSD disk so it ONLY takes around 30-60minutes) spontaneous and according to Google and a answer from MS Tech is that the BIOS is to old, well then a update on Windows7 triggered this bug, cant really tell which…

So I resolved to SCCM 2007 to do this, could I publish a new package? Boot into WinPE? Publish a task sequence?

A program package got, difficult to say the least, after some digging and testing this is how the procedure seems to must be done

Pause bitlocker

Upgrade bios

Reboot

Resume bitlocker

Then how to do this in a controlled manner? and then we got the BIOS Password to take care of also.
To do this in WinPE demanded AD connection and authentications, seemed to difficult at this time so I abandoned the ide totally.

Created a new testcollection, to have control of which computers I should be messing with
Created a new task sequence, HP BIOS Upgrade.

Remove BIOS password

Disable Bitlocker

Upgrade BIOS

Reboot

Enable Bitlocker

Set BIOS password

Remove myself from the collection

and to create biospackages for each computermodel that demanded a new bios, WMI queries for model and biosdate and ending with removing itself from the collection.
One example on WMI query and if statement around it that all these queries must be true.

Select * From Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE Model LIKE "%ProBook 6570%"SELECT * FROM Win32_BIOS WHERE ReleaseDate < "20130328000000.000000+000"SELECT * FROM Win32_BIOS WHERE SMBIOSVERSION LIKE "%68ICF%"

Im in the stage of testing the TaskSequence now, it seems to work… I’ll get back to you about this in a bit.

Then there is to publish this to all users and having good information on what and how they are supposed todo.
This can only be done with the powercord attached and takes around 5 minutes to complete but the amount of time invested for the IT department is quite big, but would be alot more hourse if we had to do this manually (if even ever to be done…)

Symptoms

Virtual machine has an IDE virtual disk but the additional secondary virtual disks are SCSI with an LSI or Bus Logic controller.

Virtual machine fails to boot with only a black screen after conversion with possible underscore. The Primary disk is an IDE virtual disk but LSI or Bus Logic was selected during conversion.

After conversion using P2V, the virtual machine fails to boot

Resolution

When converting a physical machine to a virtual machine using VMware Converter or vCenter Converter Enterprise, if an adapter type is not selected during the initial customization the resulting virtual machine may contain an IDE disk as the primary OS disk.

You must convert the IDE disk to SCSI to get the best performance. If the primary disk is an IDE virtual disk, the newly converted virtual machine may fail to boot because the guest OS does not support the driver. Second reason for this issue is that in ESX 4.x the default disk type for Windows XP 32bit virtual machine creation is IDE. This default value can be manually changed during the virtual machine creation wizard by selecting the custom option. Windows XP 64bit will still use SCSI by default.

Locate the datastore path where the virtual machine resides. For example:/vmfs/volumes/<datastore_name>/<vm_name>/

From the ESX Service Console, open edit the primary disk (.vmdk) in a text editor.

Look for the line:ddb.adapterType = ”ide”

To change the adapter type to LSI Logic change the line to:ddb.adapterType = ”lsilogic”To change the adapter type to Bus Logic change the line to:ddb.adapterType = ”buslogic”

Save the file.

From VMware Infrastructure or vSphere Client

Click Edit Settings for the virtual machine.

Select the IDE virtual disk.

Choose to Remove the Disk from the virtual machine.

Click OK.Caution: Make sure that you do not choose Remove from disk.

From the Edit Settings menu for this virtual machine:

Click Add > Hard Disk > Use Existing Virtual Disk.

Navigate to the location of the disk and select to add it into the virtual machine.

Choose the same controller as in Step 3 as the adapter type. The SCSI ID should read SCSI 0:0.

If a CDROM device exists in the virtual machine it may need to have the IDE channel adjusted from IDE 0:1 to IDE 0:0. If this option is greyed out, remove the CDROM from the virtual machine and add it back. This sets it to IDE 0:0.

Additional Information

In some cases, a primary operating system virtual disk is set up as IDE while the additional virtual disks are set up as LSI or Bus Logic SCSI disks. In this situation, after editing the IDE disk adapter type and removing the disk from the virtual machine in Edit Settings, you must change the SCSI channel for the secondary disks to free up SCSI 0:0 for the main OS disk.

Change the SCSI 0:0 disk to SCSI 0:1, then when you add the primary OS disk back into the virtual machine with the new LSI Logic adapter type, you can select SCSI 0:0 for the disk.

Update 20130105

The default CFQ I/O scheduler is a poor choice for guest virtual machines (and most systems). You’ll want to modify it. I used to just recommend setting the scheduler to deadline, but there’s an easier method now for RHEL/CentOS systems…

The best way to handle that and a couple of other tunables is to download the tuned framework and apply a better profile to the system.

In your case:

yum install tuned tuned-utils

Once installed, try one of the appropriate profiles. For VM’s, I either do enterprise-storage orvirtual-guest. Test and see which works best for you. A reboot is NOT required between profile changes.